About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

January 2018 was interesting, with my employer being served with a notice to provide information to the Financial Services Royal Commission (Royal Commission). This involved an extraordinary amount of work, with the notice requesting information over 10 years, and involving related entities and companies, past and current and the reinsurance entities. The notice was issued when the insurance and reinsurance markets usually shut down, and the response was due in February. The notice required an enormous amount of information to be identified, compiled, reviewed and assessed. This could not have been done without a lot of work by the business and our external legal team. We had to write our own audit tool and work with the business to make determinations on the notice and prepare the submission, it was both exhausting and professionally rewarding. I have also been fortunate enough to be involved in a business re-structure, portfolio transfer and the sale and purchase of businesses within the Group. As a commercial lawyer, the last two years have been incredible.

What initiatives have you spearheaded within your legal team or wider organisation, and how have these helped the business?

The team has worked hard to build real relationships across all parts of the business, both domestically and globally. As part of this, we have tried to be more efficient, to innovate and to be real client support contacts. This has helped both the legal and compliance function and the business. It gives the team a platform to be enablers with empowerment.

What are the most important considerations you have when recruiting new team members?

A good fit with a sense of fun, and a healthy mix of responsibility and maturity. Team members also need to have a certain amount of resilience and have the ability and be willing to challenge and question the norm.

What can external legal service providers do to improve their services to you?

External legal providers could better use of technology and innovation and provide closer support to the business, not only in relation to the traditional secondments, but helping me with growing my team with reverse secondments with firms, which would provide valuable up-skill opportunities, and a better exchange of information on what is happening in the market and where we are going. I often find that panel firms are more reactive than proactive and wait for instructions. I would find it more beneficial if panel firms were more pro-active and providing 1:1 confessionals, learning insights and post matter review discussions, including lessons learned, would be invaluable. This could include, what could be done better or differently? Lawyers often neglect to do the post-implementation review (PIR) with the client, who maybe both happy or grumpy. The PIR now forms part of key risk and project management and I think the firms should also be doing this. I also think that panel lawyers should try to be more across our international obligations, not just domestic. This would help me with our global obligations. This has been recently highlighted by privacy and cyber developments worldwide. Having said that, panel firms should also acknowledge that when they are on the bench, they are on the bench, until they get pulled into the next game. I appreciate, that there is a balance.

What do you predict will be the biggest change in the legal market in your sector over the next few years?

I predict that artificial intelligence and resultant cyber risks, data privacy and the use of data ethically in all forms of product design, pricing and underwriting financial services, will be very dynamic.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or GC what would it be and why?

The most important thing to remember is to support your in-house clients, with accurate, ethical, sensible and pragmatic advice. Success can be measured in different ways, when you have gained the trust of your stakeholders, board, management and other staff, you have succeeded. Good lawyers can play in the grey but great lawyers know where the line is, and when it can or should not be crossed and how to bring your stakeholders along on that process is key. Adopting the open door philosophy, junior lawyers do not have to be the smartest person in the room, but they do have to listen, not be afraid to ask the silly question, be brave enough to think and challenge accepted norms and admit mistakes quickly.